Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer fundraise on Norway attack

As a writer, it sure sucks when someone murders a bunch of people based on your ideas. (I mean, I assume that sucks. Weirdly, it’s never happened to me.) So you can understand why right-wing anti-Islam bloggers are all being kind of defensive, these days.

Anders Breivik, the anti-Islam terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway on July 22, read a lot of American anti-Islam bloggers, many of whom he cited in his lengthy manifesto. Breivik’s favorites included Robert Spencer, a self-proclaimed expert on Islam whose “Jihad Watch” blog was quoted and cited in Breivik’s manifesto, and Spencer’s ally and collaborator Pam Geller, whose “Atlas Shrugs” was similarly recommended by the killer.

So some people have been like, “hey, wow guys, a crazy person took everything you write so seriously that he murdered a bunch of people, in the name of protecting his nation from the creeping ‘Islamization’ of Europe that you guys constantly crow about, maybe you guys should stop and think for a minute about the horrible, hateful things you all write, all the time.” And Spencer and Geller have basically screeched back, “CENSORSHIP!!!!!”

They are now actually fundraising on the fact that they helped inspire a massacre. Or more accurately, they’re begging for money to protect them from the imaginary witch hunt that they claim the liberals will mount. (Is this part of the witch hunt? I am always confused about whether I’m witch-hunting or not, when I call people horrid hateful bigots.) Spencer also signed Geller’s fundraising blog, and if you donate more than $500 to Atlas Shrugs, ThinkProgress reports, they will send you a signed copy of Geller’s book, “Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.” (I assume a coordinated terror attack against radical Islam’s liberal enablers is written off in the pamphlet as impractical.)

People are not responsible for what crazy people do after reading their blog posts for years, obviously (though inciting fear of and hatred for ethnic and religious minority groups tends to be the sort of speech with the bloodiest track record), and Pamela Geller never called on anyone to go out and murder some liberals, to save us from the Islamists. But she has now stopped just short of justifying the attacks, after the fact!

But the more that is revealed about that youth indoctrination center, the more grotesque the whole story becomes. Of course, the genocidal leftists will twist what I write here; I am not condoning the slaughter in Norway or anywhere. I abhor violence (except in regard to self defense). But the jihad-loving media never told us what antisemitic war games they were playing on that island. Utoya Island is a Communist/Socialist campground, and they clearly had a pro-Islamic agenda.

Only the malevolent media could use the euphemism summer camp and get away with it.

The slaughter was horrific. What these kids were being taught and instructed to do was a different kind of grotesque. There is no justification for Breivik’s actions whatsoever. There is also no justification for Norway’s antisemitism and demonization of Israel.

Those are pretty perfunctory disclaimers against violence. Those dead people clearly had a pro-Islamic agenda! “Antisemitic war games” makes the victims sound like … soldiers preparing to attack Israel, making violence against them conceivably an act of “defense of Israel,” which is, of course, a justification for violence that in Geller’s world is indistinguishable from “self-defense.”

So! Please remember how horribly these guys are reacting to what should be a moment of shameful self-reflection for them, the next time you see them cited in some newspaper editorial or interviews on Fox or something.

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More: Alex Pareene

The Racist Scourge

LONDON — Soon after I was born my father moved our family from Britain back to his native South Africa to become dean of the school for black medical students at the University of the Witwatersrand. Blacks were obliged to live separately from whites, a principal reason for his having left Johannesburg in the first place.

There had been some troubles. He told the students he was handing them responsibility for their affairs. That helped settle things on campus. Outside was a different story. Much of my father’s time was spent going to police stations to negotiate the release of black students who had been detained for no reason by stupid white cops.

Once he arrived to hear an Afrikaner policeman scoffing at a young black woman who was close to qualification as a doctor: “You think you’re some clever student, but really you’re just a Kaffir.” (The insult is now legally actionable in South Africa.)

Racism is stupidity’s recourse. There are plenty of stupid people in the world. Apartheid survived for almost a half-century, a system based on the view that the only thing blacks were good for was to work as hewers of wood and drawers of water. It had its American parallels: Jim Crow laws were on the books for almost a century.

That was the first year of my life, with the black Wits students. My father returned with the family to England. We’d go back regularly to South Africa. I remember the jacarandas, the faraway horizons, the firm yellow peaches. Beauty was too abundant. A shadow lurked. That’s how I absorbed racism, like a twinge, the first hint of a dangerous microbe in your blood.

These things shape you. The Jews in South Africa tended to view the blacks as a large buffer against their own persecution even as they were more engaged than most in trying to break the system. It’s a grotesque thought, but if you’re busy persecuting tens of millions of blacks you don’t have much time left over for tens of thousands of Jews. This thought did occur to the Jews, whose families (many of Lithuanian origin), had fled European pogroms and so avoided the ditches to which Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen would have dispatched them.

As a South African Jew, watching blacks without passes being bundled into the back of police vans was discomfiting. But this was not mass murder after all. You tried to look away.

Racism is a mind game. It makes its victims grateful for small mercies until such time as they rise in uncontainable anger.

I was schooled early by South Africa in racism’s poison. The Michels, my maternal family, lived in a spread only half-jokingly referred to as Château Michel. From beach to pool to barbecue the living was large, with its undertow of disquiet.

I felt as an infant the I-might-drop-you hostility in a black maid’s arms. I wondered at the blacks swimming in a filthy harbor when whites-only sand stretched for miles. I caught the illicit glances as an adolescent, flirtation as crime. I listened to the meat-chomping justifications, bigotry dressed up as scientific theory.

Years later in Lagos, watching Fela Kuti in a disco where I was the only white among a thousand blacks, I understood the word “minority.” The thing I’ve been most grateful for in journalism is the ability to cross lines: of racism and bigotry, for example. The blacks in South Africa weren’t even a minority. They were a majority corralled into serfdom.

Over in England things were O.K. I got called a “yid” for a while at school. I look up Jew in the Oxford English Dictionary of the day. Definition 1: A person of Hebrew descent; a person whose religion is Judaism. Definition 2: A person who behaves in a manner formerly attributed to Jews; a grasping or extortionate person.” There you go.

Nothing makes my blood boil like racism. I got a lot of angry mail over a recent column about Norway’s rightist mass murderer and his sympathy with “racist Islamophobia.” Muslims are not a race, the writers claimed.

Funny, several of the angry notes were from Jews, who seemed to have forgotten that not being a race but a religion had scarcely saved Jews from racist persecution: Perhaps the Einsatzgruppen just got in a semantic muddle before opening fire. Perhaps the Malaysian soccer crowd who just booed Chelsea’s Yossi Benayoun, an Israeli player and a Jew, were not really racists. Dream on.

Hatred of Muslims in Europe and the United States is a growing political industry. It’s odious, dangerous and racist. Thanks to my colleague Andrea Elliott, we now know the story of the orchestration of the successful anti-Shariah campaign in the United States, led by a Hasidic Jew named David Yerushalmi who holds that “most of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic.” The rightists in Europe using anti-Muslim rhetoric are true heirs to the Continent’s darkest hours.

I’m glad that at an impressionable age my Dad told me of a dumb white cop with power telling a smart young black woman with promise she was “really just a Kaffir.” The settings change, the vile stupidity does not.

The Oslo Terrorist’s ‘Counter-Jihad’ Ideology

Blood on their handsCharles Johnson

By now you’ve probably heard about Oslo terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s “manifesto,” a 1,516-page screed with some writing by Breivik, but mostly consisting of quotes and articles by “counter-jihad” bloggers and similar right wing sources.

(You can find it on the web if you really want to read it; I won’t link to it because there are sections that are basically a manual for terrorism; Breivik goes into great detail about the assembly and testing of the bomb, his weapons and ammunition, etc.)

But I’ve seen a lot of people mistakenly attributing the articles that make up most of the manifesto to Breivik himself. In fact, the blog source that’s probably cited the most throughout Breivik’s book is Jihad Watch, run by anti-Muslim demagogue Robert Spencer; Breivik cites Robert Spencer more than 40 times, always approvingly.

And a very large number — more than three dozen — of the lengthy articles reprinted in the book are the work of the anonymous white nationalist blogger “Fjordman,” who apparently gave Breivik permission to use them.

Back in the day, I linked to Fjordman’s articles myself; he was a big self-promoter and would email and ask for links every time he posted something. But sometime around 2007 (when I criticized him and other “counter-jihad” bloggers for making deals with extreme right wing European groups) it became clear that his seeming erudition and extreme logorrhea was a cover for a particularly nasty form of European white nationalism.

And this split is actually reflected in the articles by Fjordman that Breivik put in his book. In the early pieces you’ll see complimentary links to LGF, turning into insults and revilement in the later pieces when I called them out, then wouldn’t back down or “apologize” to these racist cretins.

Many of the most extreme statements and positions I’ve seen people quoting are actually taken directly from Fjordman himself. LGF reader Gus 802 found a great example of this, in one of Fjordman’s articles from 2009, titled The Coming Crash:

Some highlights of this one article:

• I would rank Britain as the Western European country most likely to first get a civil war caused by mass immigration and Multiculturalism.

• There will be a pan-Western and perhaps international economic and social collapse in the not-too-distant future.

• We need to learn from our enemies, both internal and external…They must be squashed, otherwise we cannot deal rationally and adequately with our external enemies.

• We must get rid of Feminism, which is destructive and merely an extension of Marxism, anyway.

• We must document what is being done to us by treasonous elites for future references, for instance by making a video dedicated to anti-white verbal and physical violence around the world. We must take steps to ensure our physical safety and regain pride in our heritage.

• The current US President Obama has publicly pledged himself to combat opposition to Islam rather than Islam itself, which means that it is official US policy to spread Islamic law.

• If the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire then the USA is the Diversity Empire, committed to spreading Multiculturalism and genetic Communism around the world, especially to white majority countries.

• The United States will not survive this century. It will be split into several countries according to ethnic, racial and perhaps even ideological lines. There is no such thing as a universal nation. People want to live with their own kind. The only ones who are not allowed to do so are whites, and they are starting to get tired of this double standard.

• Anti-white ideologies are now taught in every Western university and were arguably elevated to national ideology in the USA with the election of Obama.

Just look at what these people are saying to their right wing fans; if you follow this stuff to its sickening logical conclusion, the very fate of civilization itself is at risk. It’s an apocalyptic view, a vision of a war for existence against the encroaching dark-skinned hordes.

Among people who truly believe this paranoid world view, is it any wonder that one of them finally took the next step?

Unlike Jared Loughner (the shooter of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords), with Anders Behring Breivik there’s no doubt whatsoever where he got the inspiration and the ideology that led inexorably to the horror in Oslo.

When Gabrielle Giffords and several others were shot, I was critical of the right wing blogs and Sarah Palin in particular, for encouraging a climate of violent rhetoric. But in the Norway atrocities, the responsibility is far more evident and direct.

People like Fjordman and Pamela Geller and the right wing blogosphere who spew apocalyptic rhetoric and refuse to denounce the extremists among them now have the very real blood of children on their hands.